


Meet Me in the Firefight

by orphan_account



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: (Very) Slow Burn, Gen, M/M, Read: spare my poor dumb ass, Some Ocs as side characters don't worry I try to make them less stupid, also had to make up some names since hima didn't name all of them, assuming we do, characters tagged in order of appearance, considering quarantine probably but, esports/pro gamer au, extra points if you know what i'm vaguely basing this off of, i'd like to know why there's an existing tag for fujian but not okinawa but that's not my business, i'll shut up now, ie i'm gonna update it as we go on, sue me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-10
Updated: 2020-04-10
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:33:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23581651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Honda Kiku, the former star of Paris Evangeline, a top team in the TGO Esports League. For all he's given, team management force him to retire, as he can no longer coordinate with the current roster. Wang Yao, the team Captain of Seoul Seven Tigers, offers to take him in, and despite the weighted history between them, he accepts.
Relationships: China/Japan (Hetalia)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5





	Meet Me in the Firefight

The lights of Seoul do nothing to make the winter evening any warmer, and as Kiku rolls his suitcase out from Incheon International Airport, he gets the idea that maybe, next time he remembers to go shopping, he should invest in a better coat. This one, though it’s in a fashionable silhouette, it’s more pretty than functional (Francis bought it for him at some point), and he’s had it for a few years now— it’s wearing thin.

And the wind numbs his face until he would’ve almost missed the taxicab that pulled in, had it not been for the headlights, and when the driver asks him where to go, he starts in a few halting words, having not spoken Korean in more than five years, before noticing the pained look in the old man’s face and switching to English. 

He asks him to drive to a building a few miles away from the OGN e-stadium— he’s competed there a number of times. Each win against the home team was like a cup of bitter bloody wine, and now he’s coming in like some fallen god thrown out by his priests.

He shakes his head at the thought. It’s for the better, isn’t it? Starting again, back to his roots, back to the past that he can’t really go back to.

The Captain waits for him at the front door, and Kiku almost feels like he should apologize, or something, for taking away what’s probably valuable team time— Wang Yao says something about why Kiku refused to have someone pick him up, and he offers to take his bag, and Kiku shakes his head, and they walk together in silence, up the elevator to the third floor.

The Seven Tigers logo on the back of the Captain’s jacket seems to snarl at him, and Kiku makes a mental note to maybe not wear his old team uniform. They booted him out, anyways, so he might as well look like some weird diehard fan of Paris Evangeline. It’s almost stupid how tense they are, without the lights of a stage and the veil of professionalism, just two gamers with some history they’ve never sat down to sort out.

Maybe they should sit down and talk about it, and every rational part of Kiku says they should, but not at night, two days before a match, not after a long plane flight from Paris.

Not now, maybe later, when the shock of it all dissipates and he’s maybe brushed up on his Korean some. 

He’s led to a room, one that’s a little cold since the heat was only turned on ten minutes ago, with a bare mattress and a little dust, and Wang Yao mumbles something about telling management to put in a kettle and some linens, and he asks if Kiku wants to rest first, or if he wants to find the manager, and speak a little about his potential career with the team..

If it isn’t a bother, he replies, though he hopes he doesn’t have to, feeling a little like an imposter of a Kiku that hasn’t existed in years.

The Captain doesn’t seem to get the memo, and once Kiku’s put down his bags he leads him to the elevator, again, up a floor to where HR has their cubicles. So they wait.

Wang Yao makes an attempt at small talk. “So how’s the week been treating you— I guess you really intend to return.”

The statement almost startles him, not the subject of it, but because he’s become accustomed to the slightly awkward silence. “Yeah.” 

It’s a little weird to not feel the familiar worn edges of his account card in his hand. He used to carry it everywhere he went, ever since Evangeline gave it to him as a rookie.

“You didn’t intend to leave, huh?”

“I can’t coordinate well enough with them anymore, so it’s better that I do.”

“You mean they won’t work with you.”

Kiku shakes his head, though he knows full well that’s more or less the reason. “They’re better off without me, so I took the weight off their shoulders.”

“It’s after the American one came in, is it? They wanted you to continue their championship legacy, and you weren’t giving them results, because they weren’t working with you, so they’re looking for new blood.” And even if it wasn’t the team’s choice… Management has mysterious powers, all-powerful, and sometimes with terrible decisions.

It almost makes Kiku want to say something, that he wasn’t as incompatible as Wang Yao is making it out to be, that even if they haven’t gotten into finals or semifinals these year’, they’ve always gotten into playoffs— okay, they’ve been gradually sliding down the rankings— but that’s not the point.

The point is, he’s tried, and his old team had tried, they’ve all tried and eventually they just gave up, until it’s just Kiku hoping that something will click, that something will happen and his rather dirty and roundabout playstyle will somehow _fit_ with the teamwork Paris Evangeline was famed for, that brought them an era of championships.

At least his teammates never thought to throw him out. “Are you sure you want me on the roster?”

“You retired, didn’t you?” Per the League’s rules, Kiku can’t return until next season. “We’ve half a year and a summer to sort it out.”

“You already have a pro-level Ninja account?”

The embarrassed silence he’s met with says no. “Actually,” Wang Yao scratches at his cheek, a bit unwilling to come clean with his thoughts. “Actually, I was wondering if you still remembered how to play Oni.”

Huh. Alright. “I might be rusty.” He’s played around with the class, sometimes when the League’s on break for the winter or summer, but he’s never played Oni in a pro match, and he’s never planned on it since Evangeline handed him a Ninja account.

“Can you still do it?”

“I’ll try.”

Wang Yao opens his mouth, like he was about to say some sort of encouragement, but then the door to the conference room opens and a man with greying hair— the manager, probably— comes in with a file in his hand.

Wang Yao, for the most part, was sitting there like useless moral support. Kiku’s merits speak for themselves, and they decided that he’s to join the roster next season. For the remains of this one, he can work with the Guild, online.

* * *

Unlike the pro team, who mostly live in dorms in the Seoul Seven Tigers building, only the most elite Guild members actually live onsite, and even then, most of them might commute in from their apartments in the city. The Seven Tigers Guild is headquartered a floor below the team’s training rooms, and the manager told him to look for Korawit.

Kiku’s s been avoiding the internet and the news for a few days, knowing everything that comes up in his suggestions would be something related to his ‘retirement’, like another grain of salt in the wound— because it wasn’t like he’s given up yet, and despite how esports media decide to sing his praises, he never really felt the sincerity.

But today, two mornings after he arrived from Paris and slept off most the jetlag, he gets back to the internet, for the sake of TGO Online.

He turns heads when he walks through the lower floor, and though it’s expected, (anybody who works for the Seven Tigers Guild has got to know the TGO League, and know Honda Kiku, the former star of Paris Evangeline), that doesn’t make it any less awkward. He taps on some random person’s shoulder, asking where Korawit sat, and she pointed him to a desk in the corner.

Korawit almost has his head buried behind the monitor, and judging by his thick glasses he probably has a habit of putting his face up close to the screen. But despite that and the huge, chunky noise-cancelling headphones on his ears he perks up when Kiku approaches, rising up to shake his hand. “You’ll be joining the team next year, I heard,” His Korean is slightly accented, but he speaks clearly enough that Kiku can understand, more or less, what he’s saying. “But it is a pretty big honor to have a pro working for us.”

It is? Kiku blinks, a little flustered by the compliment. Not trusting his Korean skill, he replies in English, again. He should really brush up if he’s gonna be living in Seoul for— the next few years, probably, assuming nothing comes up. “Ah, thank you.” He shakes his hand. “So for the Guild, do I help set dungeon records? Fight Wild Bosses?”

Korawit seems to catch on, and he switches to English. “Whatever we happen to need, I guess? I know the Captain is planning on having you play Oni, we already have a good amount of smurf accounts, though, I think, you’ll have to ask R&D for your future pro-level account. Though, if you want to play Ninja, I guess you could!”

“I think I’ll just… Get started with Oni. It isn’t good to put things off, especially since I’m switching classes for next season.”

Korawit nods in understanding. “You see that cabinet over there?” He points to a shelf on the opposite side of the room. “That’s where all the smurfs are, just choose a max-level one, it doesn’t matter which, just find me in the God’s Realm once you log in. I’m a Witch, account name Palm Ashes— oh, and, uhhh… You see there?”

Kiku follows where the Guild Leader’s finger points, to an empty computer close to the window (the blinds are pulled down, to reduce reflection from the screens).

“Next to Nakasone, there’s an empty spot there you can take. I think she’s also Japanese, so she can help with your Korean, too— you can get by in the building with your English, we all come from a bunch of different countries, but if you’re going to get some coffee outside it’s good to at least know how to carry a conversation.”

“Thank you.” He nods, and Korawit flashes him a thumbs up, before putting his headphones back on.

The cabinet is organized quite neatly, drawers labelled by class and ordered by level and server. It doesn’t really matter which server he chooses, when he’s supposed to enter the God’s Realm, where the highest-level accounts come to fight it out in a no-man’s land with high drop rates and all that.

TGO Online— The Glorious Ones, an MMORPG Kiku’s been playing since sixteen. At 26, he’s gone a long way, from a fresh newbie to the League’s greatest Ninja— former greatest, he can’t defend his title anymore, it could change, and he’s back to the bottom, back to the class he played in his dungeoning days.

Oni is part of the Swordsman superclass, along with Berserker, Warrior, and Hexblade. As the name indicates, characters in the Oni subclass look a little demonic, with dark scleras and a horn protruding from their forehead. Like Ninja, they rely somewhat on speed, but while other Swordsman subclasses, like Berserker and Warrior, tend to be more tank and DPS types, Oni is similar to Hexblade in how they both cast area-of-effect spells, but on a sliding scale, Oni is far off on the crowd-control, offensive support end while Hexblade tends more towards midrange melee. 

Kiku remembers he first chose this class because the character wore a yukata and wielded a tachi, and he maybe was a little too into feudal Japanese history at sixteen years old. Nevertheless, he ended up sticking with it because it fit his playstyle. Named the account Kanagawa. Don’t quite remember where it went.

Nevermind that. He grabs a max-level Oni account card and takes a seat the empty computer Korawit pointed him to. The one next to him— Nakasone, he thinks that’s what her name was? He mumbles a hello in Japanese.

She grunts in reply, and he notices her hands are tattooed. His first thought was how she probably wasn’t allowed in any bathhouses, and his second thought was about how he remembered hearing it was a trend in one of the southern prefectures.

“I like your tattoo,” He mumbles, rather awkwardly before he slides the account card in the reader.

“Thanks.” 

Kiku notes that her voice is stressing the wrong syllables— a dialect, perhaps. He shakes his head at his thoughts. Get back to work, find Korawit in the God’s Realm— Who the hell decided naming their account Japchae Lover was a good idea? Maybe the Guild bought it for cheap… He opens up the skill tree to check the character stats. Seems okay, he can probably steal a boss like that.

He controls the Oni account (he refuses to acknowledge the name, it’s stupid) towards a combat-free zone, before pulling up the Guild list. As a smurf account belonging to the Seven Tigers Guild, of course it’s gonna be in the Guild. It’s not one of those unaffiliated spy accounts every big Guild has, for… Sabotaging other rival Guilds or whatever. Hey, materials are pretty important for crafting high-end equipment, and the Guilds of pro teams are more pressed for those materials. That’s like the natural law of TGO, and even the pros sometimes help their Guilds get wild bosses over the summer, after the season ends.

Palm Ashes is conveniently the Guild Leader for the God’s Realm server, so Kiku sends him a message

> [Oni] Japchae Lover: This is Honda Kiku
> 
> [Oni] Japchae Lover: Where are you?
> 
> [Witch] Palm Ashes: the dark swamp, can you help the guild get the bandit king?
> 
> [Oni] Japchae Lover: [thumbs up] On my way

He controls the Oni account to go east, towards the region of the Dark Swamp. The thin material of the avatar’s yukata flaps in the wind, and it reminds him of being sixteen, and knowing nothing of Guild politics, or the terrible mistakes of team managements, or of any empty promises made to his greatest online friends

He wonders if the pro team eats lunch at the same time as the Guild. It’s been a while since he and the team Captain have talked face-to-face, not as professionals but human beings.

**Author's Note:**

> Since I'm pretty sure these people don't have official names--  
> Thailand-- I'm calling him Korawit for now. We'll choose a last name when we need it.  
> Okinawa-- Higa Nakasone. I know the Ryukyuan Islands are mentioned to exist but. She kinda represents the Okinawa islands and/or the Okinawan people?? And like, I dunno, I feel it's kinda important to differentiate between Yamato Japanese people and the different indigenous groups that also live in Japan?? Kind of decided she's a woman because traditionally, in Okinawan culture women represent like... Spiritual power and the inner aspects of life.,,, anyways,,
> 
> Quarantine be making us dipping back into old fandoms huh. Brownie points if you know what I'm basing this au off of.


End file.
